Despite the enduring and perceptibly increasing influence of Christian fundamentalism here the political will is constantly

Despite the enduring and perceptibly increasing influence of Christian fundamentalism here, the political will is constantly being tested and refined against the pagan chaos of brute nature. Hurricane Katrina is simply the latest chapter in the epic of American nature. It is a subject that Europeans rarely show understanding of in their often dismissive comments on US culture. Matt Drudge, in contrast, alarmed by the reported size of the submarine earthquake, instantly forecast the enormity of the event and headlined it on his online site, the Drudge Report. But to ask for powers of scientific or sociological analysis from the preening parrots currently infesting American media is a pointless exercise. The time is long gone when American broadcasting could draw on the talents of foreign correspondents who honed their skills during the Second World War. Edward R Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Howard K Smith, and Walter Cronkite had a gravitas and stoic deliberativeness that seem a million miles away from the flirty smirkiness of the airheaded moppets and gym-sculpted pretty boys who now harangue us from the TV screen.

Yet any rational observer could have predicted the delayed effects of flooding – which in this case broke through two of the levees that have protected the fragile, always soggy city from the encroachment of Lake Pontchartrain. It was a disgraceful repeat of the American media’s slow response to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean last December, when the star anchors were on Christmas vacation and had to straggle back, visibly peeved, to their studios. Despite a series of severely destructive hurricanes in the Florida panhandle, satirical jibes at overzealous weathercasters have multiplied in recent years It was a prescription for disaster. According to most reports, 80 per cent of New Orleans residents may indeed have obeyed the mayor’s appeal to evacuate – which doubtless saved countless lives. But the national media took several days to adjust to the grim and now grotesque reality on the ground.

At first, the smooth, exquisitely coiffed news anchors and their posturing on-site correspondents professed cheerful relief that Hurricane Katrina had passed by and spared picturesque New Orleans. This will concentrate public attention in America on the £100m being spent each day by the President in Iraq. Exactly where, Americans are starting to ask, do President Bush’s priorities lie? Just as in Britain, the strains created by the ill-judged intervention in Iraq are setting the parameters of political debate across the Atlantic.Meanwhile, Iraq appears to be edging closer to the abyss of civil war. The new constitution looks likely to be vetoed by disaffected Sunnis in the October referendum, which could strangle Iraqi democracy at birth And the insurgency continues to terrorise the country.

It was this climate of insecurity that sparked a stampede in Baghdad this week in which almost a thousand Shia pilgrims died. Yet, the 140,000 US troops stationed in Iraq – including those Louisiana guardsmen – are seemingly incapable of halting the bloodshed. If anything, their presence is attracting new recruits to the insurgent ranks.This has been a week of disaster, both natural and man-made And at the eye of the storm lies Iraq. We are reaping the whirlwind of the duplicitous and arrogant manner in which our leaders took us to war. And we now find ourselves tied to the consequences of the calamity we have created in that nation. It is no wonder we are finding it so hard – in Tony Blair’s unfortunate phrase – to “move on” from Iraq.. This week the US gradually awoke to the full cataclysm of Monday’s mammoth hurricane, which flooded New Orleans and ravaged the Mississippi coast It was, as several officials noted, our tsunami.